Uncle Tom, is that you?

King and Malcolm X on Violence

Malcolm X associates with Martin Luther King, a grave sin of being Uncle Tom. That of being a house nigger who used to live with the slave master and enjoyed the comfort of eating, living and wearing whatever the slave master left him. Malcolm situates the house negro into his present and speaks about him being the slave of the Whites still, claiming to represent the “field negroes” who have had to bear the brunt of the worst experiences. This bears resonance to the fact that Malcolm was a man born out of pain, with his father being killed by white supremacists and living a life hardened by the streets of the ugly America. Perhaps then with his pain, it should be understood why Malcolm’s view on life was that of “any means necessary” – be it of a road through violence.

Malcolm while raising multiple questions on the contradictions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, professes that, “Revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile” and revolution can’t be peaceful or in his words, “there is no such thing as a non-violent revolution”.

He claims himself as the field nigger and demarcates himself from the house nigger in two key ways; for wanting his own land – which is what a real revolution should be like, which the house nigger opposes and to stop suffering peacefully as the Whites and the house negroes want him to be. This is also where Malcolm and King also diverged in their philosophies.

King was the advocate of the principles of non-violence that were inspired by Gandhi’s of ahimsa. King’s idea of “consistent refusal to inflict injury upon another” was unacceptable to Malcolm who saw this as being told to peacefully suffer and not to stop suffering.

For Malcolm, non- violence was the teaching by the white men through King to be defenceless in the face of the white man.

However, King’s situation is one that must be understood before one completely discounts non-violence as being 'cowardly' – King's philosophy was never of pacifism or completely doing away with the ability of self defense. King’s philosophy can be interpreted as that of placing discourse and peaceful negotiation. His view of the militant non-violence was that of making the passive act of being non-violent into an affirmative action. This was for King a manner to utilizing non-violent actions to pursue goals that would be otherwise in violent chaos, be lost along with the inevitable trauma and loss. King’s choice in his political philosophy was not that of choosing non-violence over violence but of facing the threat of existence with the choice of violence. 

However, it can be found that perhaps with the ideas of Malcolm X, MLK was made more palatable and set the stage for MLK to succeed as his views were consumed as less explosive and workable.